This touches on another thing, which is “Thing X is known to be imperfect, Pat says thing Y is better. Nobody else on the team has tried Y but we have all these aphorisms like ‘no silver bullet’ that lead us to think Y can’t be that good.”

When somebody presents me with a new shiny solution to a hard problem describing it as a silver bullet, I immediately become suspicious. So, it depends a lot on how good Pat says that Y is.

Do these people actually say, “this is a silver bullet” or is that your interpretation? Does this mean is pat undersells you on Y you might be more receptive?

It's not about underselling, it's about showing awareness that there are always tradeoffs. I'm much more receptive when they did their due diligence about those and the risks for the project.

Y is not necessarily better than X, but perhaps you should look to see in case perhaps Y is actually better. (Or maybe in some ways it is better and other ways not so much better. Or maybe it is better for what they are doing but not you.)

Also, sometimes something is, although not perfect, can be improved without breaking or making it too messy, but, sometimes not.